On this page: About Outputs Research questions Mailing list

Participants in Dagstuhl Seminar 24161

About

Research software is crucial to all computational research across many academic disciplines. Multiple communities are invested in research software, including computer scientists, and first and foremost among them, software engineering researchers, who investigate and develop methods to improve the quality of software and its lifecycle processes. The software engineering for science community does this specifically for research software. Research software engineers (RSEs) in turn select, customize, and apply software engineering methods from computer science within the domain of academic research to create research software.

There is currently an insufficient transfer of state-of-the-art research knowledge from computer science to research software engineering, and vice versa, in part, leading to an incomplete understanding in computer science of the domain-specific and general challenges in research software engineering.

This interactive seminar therefore brings the computer science and software engineering research community and the research software engineering community together to define a common language, and apply it to improve reciprocal knowledge transfer.

We assume communities “just happen,” but it’s hard work!
— Heidi Seibold

About the title

The title of the site, “(R)SE(R)”, is (nearly) a regular expression for various abbreviations we used a lot in our discussions: software engineering (SE); software engineering research (SER); research software (RS); research software engineering (RSE); and research software engineering research (RSER), aka research on RSE. The proper regular expression would be “(R)?SE(R)?”.

Outputs

  • Papers
    • Papers from this seminar will be published in a Special Issue “Research Software Engineering: Discovering and Bridging Knowledge Gaps” of IEEE Computing in Science & Engineering,
      planned for publication as issue 2/2025 (Apr-Jun 2025).
  • Reports
    • Stephan Druskat, Lars Grunske, Caroline Jay, and Daniel S. Katz. Research Software Engineering: Bridging Knowledge Gaps (Dagstuhl Seminar 24161). In Dagstuhl Reports, Volume 14, Issue 4, pp. 42-53, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/DagRep.14.4.42
      • Abstract: This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar “Research Software Engineering: Bridging Knowledge Gaps” (24161). The seminar brought together participants from the research software engineering and software engineering research communities, as well as experts in research software education and community building to identify knowledge gaps between the two communities, and start collaborations to overcome these gaps. Over the course of five days, participants engaged in learning about each others’ work and collaborated in breakout groups on specific topics at the intersection between the two communities. Outputs from the working groups will be collected in a journal special issue and distributed via a dedicated website.
  • Events organized
  • Posters
  • Blog posts
  • Videos
  • Websites
  • Music
  • Online discussion spaces

Research questions

The Research questions page lists open research questions for software engineering research on research software engineering. The list has been compiled from research questions provided by software engineering researchers before and during the Dagstuhl Seminar.

This is a living list and you are welcome to contribute if you know of work that covers one of the research questions, or if you have an open research question in this area.

Mailing list

For updates and to join the discussion, subscribe to our mailing list:
✉ ser-rse-bridge@listserv.dfn.de